Dave Pelzer: 'You don't get over it, just accept it'

The story of his brutal childhood was the first 'misery memoir', and Dave Pelzer has since dedicated his life to helping others survive trauma. Cassandra Jardine meets him

"I didn't speak for years," he says, observing my desperate signals when I wish to ask a question.

"Now you can't shut me up." He darts from one topic to another, often breaking into the voices of his two tough-guy heroes, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, in order to lighten his message: life is tough, but get on with it.

Pelzer was never going to be Mr Ordinary, not after the ordeal which he describes in his book, A Child Called "It".

He grew up in San Francisco and, from the age of four until he was rescued in 1973, aged 12, his drunken mother made a scapegoat of her third son, using him as the family slave.

She wanted to kill him; her only dilemma was how - so she starved him and stabbed him, froze him in icy baths, gassed him with noxious chemical cocktails when he was cleaning the bathroom, and gave him spoonfuls of ammonia to drink.

It's such a miracle to have survived the torture and deprivation he describes that, in the decade since A Child Called "It" became a long-term bestseller, some have questioned the veracity of his gruesome memories.

It is certainly hard to credit that this healthy-looking man of 47 was once so hungry that he stole from bins, freezers and classmates' lunchboxes in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Psychologically, however, it is abundantly plain that something terrible happened.

As a child, he was beaten if he didn't get all the family chores done in record time. That has left him with what he tellingly describes as a "furious" work ethic.

"I work 338 days a year, 16 hours a day," he recounts at breakneck speed. "I plan my life in 15-minute sections. That includes 15 minutes for going to the bathroom."

Into those long working hours he fits writing, lecturing, saving people and constant travel.

If there's a disaster, he's there. Whether it's boosting the morale of American troops in Iraq, helping those made homeless by Hurricane Katrina or responding to a child who has disclosed abuse, he wants to be there, telling people that he survived and so can they.

"My message has always been about resilience," he says of his seventh and latest book, Moving Forward.

But that's not always what others took from his books. He first began breaking publishing records following his appearance on American television in 1997, four years after A Child Called "It" came out on the 20th anniversary of his liberation: the floodgates opened and the misery memoir was born.

Other famous titles included Angela's Ashes, Damaged and Ugly. Some complained of abuse in print (fictitiously, in some cases, and to great financial gain in many); others in private.

This fashion for victimhood spawned women such as Joelene, quoted by Pelzer in Moving Forward.

Joelene has spent 30 years trying to get over the single occasion when her father hit her.

"Are we talking about trauma or drama?" asks Pelzer, who has no respect for those who whine, keep wounds open and become therapy junkies. His recipe for happiness is to talk about your problems enough to get them in perspective, then move on. "You don't get over it, just accept [it]."

"Something good comes out of every crisis." Whenever pain seems too much to bear he recommends counting to 60 backwards, as he did when squeezing the pus from his own stab wound or attempting to sleep with a broken arm. It helps you stay in control.

Attitudes and legislation have changed vastly since he suffered in the Seventies.

"Back then one of my teachers was fired for trying to help me. Child abuse was a private matter. Now the abuse would have been picked up when I was in kindergarten." If some say that the pendulum has swung too far and innocent parents are finding themselves falsely accused by over-zealous abuse scouts, that's preferable.

"I would rather be proactive than have people say: 'Gosh, we could have done something.' At least now we can talk about abuse, which we wouldn't when I was young, nor when my mother - who was herself horribly abused physically and mentally - was growing up."

This openness, combined with his determination to be a good father, has meant that the cancer of abuse has not spread to Stephen, the child of his first marriage, now 22. "You can't have met a happier child in the history of the universe," says the proud father.

He cites this as his greatest achievement, but he has recently undergone several less uplifting experiences.

There's a chapter half-way through the book in which he rages about the publishers demanding more up-to-date examples of triumph over adversity.

For a man whose diary was already bursting, this was a major trauma - or was it a drama? Ever positive, he turned it into a lesson in "doing what has to be done".

So there's even a section on finding the good in a disastrous interview in the New York Times in 2002, which included remarks from his grandmother and one of his brothers saying that his childhood was not as bad he made out. His message: if you know in your heart something is true, don't be deflected.

His publishers also forced him to address the collapse of his second marriage. The year after the NYT exposé, Marsha Pelzer leapt into print with a long defence of her husband whom she met when she was running his office.

"After eight years of knowing and working with this man, he still amazes me," she wrote of her "soulmate".

Yet, not long after, she left. This time the uplifting message is that, although he was sleepless, unable to eat and "broken to the core", realising that others were yet worse off got him through. But what happened?

"There should be a rule that married people don't work together," he says. "And it's not easy when your work takes you to the heart of darkness." Exhausted by striving to help others, he had little time or energy left for his marriage. "I cannot say 'No'," he admits. Why's that?

He suffers from two psychological problems, he believes. The first is survivor's guilt. "After I left, my mother was like a raging bear. She turned on first one, then another of my brothers. (Richard Pelzer has since written his own misery memoir.)

They didn't have the defensive skills that I had developed." His way of making sense of his escape is that he was blessed for a reason: it is his mission to keep saving others.

His second problem is with attachment. Intimacy and trust are hard for a man whose mother loved him when he was small, then turned on him. "The biggest lesson I have learnt is to stop craving my mother's approval. Am I lonely now? You bet.

But I have a new girlfriend who is beautiful and funny. I'm learning to take things slowly, to listen to her more and schedule time for our relationship."

By now we have run 10 minutes over our allotted hour. He is looking edgy. This quarter-hour slot could be used for working for his criminal justice degree, responding to the 200 people who contact him every day, learning the piano or growing his favourite flower which is, appropriately, Impatiens.

Or he could be writing his next book: "It will be about this guy who saved the world but lost his wife in the process." I think we can guess the message.

• Ugly by Constance Briscoe: An abused child grows up to become a judge Dave Pelzer is a strange man. He hasn't slept for three days before I meet him and hasn't eaten for 24 hours, yet he neither yawns nor eats any of the biscuits put in front of us. What he does do, though, is talk, unstoppably.

•'Moving Forward: Taking the Lead In Your Life' by Dave Pelzer (Orion £14.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £12.99+ £1.25 p&p. To order call 0870 428 4112 or go to www.books.telegraph.co.uk